Bio-Engineering In The Brave New World.

The Atlantic Monthly, which churns out some of the most thought-provoking prose in American topical literature, has presented a fascinating article on "Hacking the President's DNA."  The premise of the story is that it will soon be possible  for anyone who can obtain another person's DNA, in this case the President of the United States, to develop a designer pathogen that is lethal to that person. The  pathogen might be spread, like the flu, by a host of persons who were unwittingly infected with it without much outward effect,  until it reaches the POTUS and kills or disables him.

I can't speak to the likelihood of that scenario actually occurring, as it still smacks of science fiction.  But I'd recommend the article to anyone who, like me, was unaware of how far genetic manipulation has come.  I knew that genome sequencing has fallen to the $1000 per person level, and will soon be even less expensive, and more ubiquitous.  But I  was surprised by the amount of gene splicing and biological manipulation that is possible by small scale hobbyists and biological hackers.  The ease with  which "designer life" can be created, for good and ill, is impressive.  In  the past obtaining bacteria that ate petroleum  from oil spills,  or manufactured biodiesel from CO2 and water, required finding a natural organism and carefully cultivating it.  It now appears that such organisms can be created out of whole (genetic) cloth, and can be designed to be more efficient and operate under variable conditions.  The implications for energy production and our environment are staggering. Here's a description of what is going on now:

But Venter merely grazed the surface. Plummeting costs and increasing technical simplicity are allowing synthetic biologists to tinker with life in ways never before feasible. In 2006, for example, Jay D. Keasling, a biochemical engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, stitched together 10 synthetic genes made from the genetic blueprints of three different organisms to create a novel yeast that can manufacture the precursor to the antimalarial drug artemisinin, artemisinic acid, natural supplies of which fluctuate greatly. Meanwhile, Venter’s company Synthetic Genomics is working in partnership with ExxonMobil on a designer algae that consumes carbon dioxide and excretes biofuel; his spin-off company Synthetic Genomics Vaccines is trying to develop flu-fighting vaccines that can be made in hours or days instead of the six-plus months now required. Solazyme, a synbio company based in San Francisco, is making biodiesel with engineered micro-algae. Material scientists are also getting in on the action: DuPont and Tate & Lyle, for instance, have jointly designed a highly efficient and environmentally friendly organism that ingests corn sugar and excretes propanediol, a substance used in a wide range of consumer goods, from cosmetics to cleaning products.

The authors of the piece were Andrew Hessel, Mark Goodman and Steven Kotler